EEBA's High Performance Home Blog

Energy efficient buildings are in high demand, both for commercial and residential customers. There are a number of advantages to building or retrofitting your home so that it is energy efficient. Energy efficient homes are: More cost effective More environmentally friendly Sold at a premium to buyers concerned with environmentally conscious living Energy efficiency and insulation go hand in hand. We’ll go into details explaining why throughout this article, but there’s one important concept we need to address before going further: the building envelope. Building envelopes are what separates your home’s interior environment from the exterior environment. Heat naturally flows to cold places, so in the summertime heat will try to enter your home, while in the winter heat will try to exit your home. Insulation serves many roles, and impeding heat transfer in order to maintain a comfortable interior environment is one of the most important ones. The Basics The more ... read more

Looking for Housing Market Clues EnergyLogic’s CEO, Steve Byers, offered an interesting insight this week. He noted that, while many are claiming a V-shaped housing market recovery, we should look more closely at the geographic trends of COVID-19 cases in the country to get a better picture of the effects on housing markets in coming months. Housing Leading a Strong Recovery Thus far in this pandemic, housing has held up well. Weekly U.S. pending home sales have rebounded substantially and are now only down 6.5% year-over-year. Click to expand image. Source: Redfin Expectations among homebuilders have regained ground too, with the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index survey of builders at 58 in June, positive again after falling below the neutral value of 50 in April and May. Public expectations are high as well, with the iShares U.S. Home Construction ETF (ITB) index of public homebuilder stocks up 79.5% from its closing low of $24.14 on in late March. Neither ...

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Hardly affected by growing support for decarbonizing the energy system, fossil fuels are expected to continue dominating global energy. Natural gas has not reset the carbon trajectory. In the US, carbon dioxide emissions from burning natural gas have surpassed those from burning coal. EIA expects no relief: world energy consumption is expected to grow from 549 quadrillion Btu in 2012 to 815 quadrillion Btu in 2040. McKinsey projects that energy-related greenhouse gas emissions will rise 14 percent in the next 20 years. The New York Times drew attention to the decarbonizing challenge: “Even with the impressive recent gains for renewable energy, the world is still far from solving global warming……One reason: carbon-free sources like wind, solar and nuclear power aren’t yet growing fast enough to keep up with rising global energy demand…….global coal consumption could stay flat for decades……the average coal plant in Asia is less than 15 years old (compared to about 41 years... 

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Parsing Signals From Latest Data The outlook for housing in the midst of the COVID-19-induced recession is murky at best. The Housing Tides team has been exploring a wide swath of data from publicly-available sources as we try to make sense of the latest developments. Taken as a whole, we note that housing has performed admirably given the scope of the economic challenges at hand. Lowest-Ever Mortgage Rates Support Prices, Prevent Inventory Glut As Jeff Whiton explained for the Housing Tides blog in May, the dearth of housing inventory in recent years has proven a tremendous advantage for home sellers – both new and existing – during the present crisis. As he suggested, home prices have thus far remained resilient, with Redfin reporting the Denver median sales price was $435k, a year-over-year increase of 1.9%. Prices have surely been buoyed by Denver inventory that totaled just 2.1 months of supply in May. An EnergyLogic survey of quick move-in homes among major.

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